Sunday, 31 October 2010

I blogged about creating the Glasgow Perl Mongers group some time ago; I feel it's time to talk about it again :)

First things first, the fine folks handling pm.org finally redirected the domain and made things official: glasgow.pm.org is now our site.
Thanks guys, we do owe you a couple beers!

We have had our first social and our first technical meeting, and we're heading into our second technical meeting, scheduled for November 11th. The aim of the group is to have recurring monthly technical meetings, possibly related to Perl.

For our next monthly meeting, things are looking great: we'll have a talk on comparing Git and darcs, by Miles Gould, a talk about "Loops without loops: Ocaml and Perl as functional languages", by Chris Yocum and probably even another one on automatically compiling statically typeable portions of Perl scripts, by Wim Vanderbauwhede.

Things are looking great! If we keep up this pace, we'll surely have a good deal of talks every month!

Thanks again to mst for having said the right words and suggesting that yes, creating a Perl Mongers group in Glasgow was well within what I could do.

All, you're more than welcome to join us on our technical meetings ;) We do have a social meeting afterwards (Drinkers.pm) at a local pub as well.

Thursday, 26 August 2010

I talked about it a bit with a friend who'll be back in the country soon enough and even today at work, and I think we may have enough people to kickstart the new Perl mongers group.

I know there are several businesses and people in the West of Scotland who either use or like Perl, so I am hoping that enough of them would like to join the group.

I've sent the request to pm.org's support to reinstate the old Glasgow.pm. I will endeavour to bring the mailing list and website up as soon as possible, and will start reaching out to people who use Perl in the area. Dear lazyweb, could you help me?

In contrast with Edinburgh.pm's meetings, which are mostly "social" gatherings in the pub, I would like Glasgow.pm's meetings to be a bit more on the technical side. I am hoping we will be able to secure a good venue for that (crossing fingers!), and that we'll have enough people and interest to have a bunch of talks and lightning talks at each meeting.
Depending on what the consensus is, I think we may end up having a technical meeting one month, and one social meeting the next.

Please spread the word if you think somebody in the area may be interested in coming along, and feel free to contact me both on this blog and via e-mail at mfontani at cpan dot org.

Oh, and I'd be proposing the second tuesday of the month as the meeting's day (Edinburgh.pm's is the fourth Thursday -- tomorrow). This would allow people in either city to attend either meetings.